Andy Warhol's Marilyn

Sometimes, when I don't have anything to read, I look up a topic on Wikipedia. The other day, my topic was pop artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987). You can look him up on Wikipedia, just like I did, and research him on the internet. Thanks to technology, you can even listen to some of his interviews. In one of these, in the spirit of Christian love, he said, "I've never met a person I couldn't call a beauty."

I will not rehash the whole thing here, but I have an observation about Warhol concerning the pull between his faith and his interest in fame.

Born Andrej Varhola, Jr., in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Warhol was the third son of Slovakian immigrants. He and his family were devout Byzantine (or Ruthenian) Catholics. This church originated in his parents' homeland, Carpathian Ruthenia, from the ninth century--before the Great Schism (1054)--and so is still in full communion with both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

As a boy, Warhol and his family went to St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949, he moved to New York City, and his mother joined him at some point. Every Sunday he went to mass at St. Thomas More Church, with his mother until her death in 1972 and then afterwards with his dachshund, Archie. Often he went during the week as well.

Warhol was obsessed with fame, an obsession that began in childhood when he was bedridden, during which time he drew, listened to the radio, and arranged pictures of celebrities around his bed. You could see this interest in celebrities as the other side of religious devotion. Salvation through God? Why not ensure some earthly salvation too, by becoming famous and by concerning oneself with others who are famous. An observer remarked that Warhol chose St. Thomas More as his church because famous people, including the Kennedys, attended.

In the days following Marilyn Monroe's death on August 5, 1962, Warhol decided to immortalize her in his Marilyn Diptych. He chose a publicity still from her first movie, Niagara (made in 1953), and silk-screened acrylic onto canvas: twenty-five images of her face are arranged in a 5x5 grid in color on the left side of the canvas and twenty-five images are arranged in the same kind of grid on the right in black and white. (The finished size of the painting: about 81 by 114 inches, or almost phi, the golden ratio, in tribute to her beauty).

In an optical illusion, the color side of the work seems to come forward and show Marilyn in real life. The black-and-white side of the work seems to recede and show her in the shadows, where a ghost might reside.

In another sort of illusion, the images appear to degrade as they are repeated across the canvas. The artist did not clean the screens of gloppy acrylic residue from one image to the next (although it looks like he did clean them between the color work and the black-and-white). Instead of an icon of beauty, Marilyn becomes a face so familiar with repetition as to become meaningless (or, in a later rendition, to be overlaid with the deaths' head of memento mori, Latin for "remember that you too will die.")

As Julian Schnabel says, “There is something at the bottom of all his work that is absolutely heartbreaking.”

Marilyn Dyptich, Andy Warhol, 1962. Held by the Tate Gallery.

Uploaded by Cmyk, 2009.